Sleeping in Velvet
from Barnes and Noble:
"I'm always impaling myself on silver things, things my
lover gives me when I'm not looking. He buys me silver rings
and puts them on me when I'm asleep. He buckles my waist with
a silver belt, drapes me with silver necklaces, fastens anklets
under my jeans, puts six earrings in the holes of my ears. Silver
and never gold, because silver is the color of the accident one
longs for. It's light that slants through rice paper shades,
a face on the street that carries you through the solstice."
So begins "Silver," one of the 27 stories in Thaisa
Frank's hauntingly beautiful new collection of short fiction,
Sleeping in Velvet. With prose as affecting as the title is magnetic,
Frank's words coalesce in a consortium of stories best described
as lovingly, uncomfortably alluring. The stories in Sleeping
in Velvet are exceptionally real; one can feel the author herself
riding in the backseats of cars, hiding in closets, and sitting
in piercing parlors or rented houses on rainy cigarette-smoke
mornings with the characters she creates. No one story is exceptionally
talkative; rather, the alignment of so many terse, color-packed
vignettes in such a way coaxes the reader to float in and out
of many lives, lives of distracted, sometimes muddled, sometimes
amorous people, and emerge bright yet gray. The arrangement of
these stories is not unlike the cinematic technique whereby the
camera follows one person down a street until the lens catches
someone even more immediately enticing and does an about-face
to shadow them. For all these characters, though, the environment
overhead is the same.
It is life right now, in all its mismatched tragedy and curiosity;
it is you and I and the people you pass on a given day, whose
lives continue on down the block just as yours does, waiting
for the walk sign or in other, intimate settings. Thaisa Frank's
Sleeping in Velvet does the literary about-face to follow passersby
a little further into privacy.
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